Sooooo the US is gonna start collecting all social media info of immigrants 🙃
Welp it was nice knowing y’all, looks like I’ll be going back to zim
It’s going into effect October 18
Here’s a link to the official federal register documents. Here’s a link to VICE with more information.
Also, feel free to leave a comment to about this regulation while it is still open (until October 18, 2017) here.
Some highlights:
This is meant to help the US identify possible terrorist threats.
Tests for this program have thus far shown to be unsuccessful
When reviewing social media content of refugees, who have been flagged as a risk due to previous screening methods, found no indication of threats on social media.
The compiling of information will be done on immigrants, including Green Card Holders and Naturalized Citizens.
The information is meant to be taken from publicly available from the internet, public records, institutions, interviewees, commercial data providers, etc.
This could require immigrants to hand over every social media handle and email address they have used in the past five years.
Information may also be obtained on those who communicate with a US immigrant.
If you have time, I would suggest leaving a comment about this regulation. Though it will not stop this change in regulation, it will give strong precedent for changing this in the future.
My commissions are now formally open! Contact me through ask, tumblr messenger, or email with questions or orders. (cm_noir@yahoo.com) NSFW commissions are priced separately, found here.
To clarify, I’ll draw any character/s you like, fandom, fandom OCs, or original characters alike.
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You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.
And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.
Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.
Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.
Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?
We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.
There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.
The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.
How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?
It’s up to you.
–uh sorry but Homestuck was racist, its jokes at the expense of black people was the number one reason why I stopped reading it, and I’m not saying nobody is allowed to enjoy it but please don’t ask people of color to just push that all aside and enjoy it for queer rep when heaven knows queer rep is a thing we’ve been pushed out of (or mocked in) too.
I absolutely respect yours and everyone’s ability to decide to stop reading a piece of media because it disappointed you in a way that you could not forgive. I myself nearly quit the comic at several points because I found it disappointing and tone deaf about issues near and dear to my own heart and my own struggles and my own personal axes.
My post isn’t about that. It isn’t about Homestuck-The-Story at all.
My post is about the archival nature of the internet and the capacity of people to grow and change. My post is about the way we as a society engage with people who grow up online, every word so easy to reference and cite. My post is about how difficult it is going to be to exist in a society where so much ignorance born from youth and privilege is out there waiting to be exposed and used against adults who grow and change and can’t erase that history no matter how much their personal politics progresses in the meantime.
My post is about a lot of things, but sure. You who quit Homestuck years ago and yet still managed to find my largely untagged discourse post tangentially related to it in 2017 less than an hour after I posted it to slam me with the least charitable interpretation of it possible are surely approaching me in good faith.
My POC ass is marrying this post. im printing it 1,000 times over and hanging it over every inch of every wall of my apartment. i love it. thanks for my life
that he knows exactly how devastatingly handsome all his friends think he is and employs it to great effect to manipulate events into playing out the way he wants them to and is deeply terrified of anyone discovering how genuinely quick witted, intelligent and overall capable he is and can be, including himself. who wants to be burdened with that. potential is hard to live up to, but ppl underestimating you forever means they’re always easily impressed, right?
my favorite jake english headcanon is that he’s a tangled lonely ball of frustrated emotions that has no idea how to handle conflict or relationships and would rather tie a sticky situation into ten thousand more knots through pretended ignorance and deferred or intentionally misdirected action than own up to feeling a single negative emotion about someone to their face because holy shit, don’t we all know, confrontation is hard
my favorite thing about jake english is that he’s one of the few compelling characters i’ve ever seen that successfully walks the tropes of canonically physically attractive, mentally deeply introverted, outwardly and arguably intentionally ineffective but secretly brilliant and oh yeah he has a really cool bisexuality arc actually defined by pieces of self-imposed heteronormativity gleaned from the cesspool of toxic masculinity that is the vast majority of action cinema that fuck both him and his best friend and crush and future love interest up enormously for years.
my favorite jake english thing is that he’s a complex and nuanced character like so much of homestuck’s cast and I see so much in him that’s relatable and so much that’s frustrating and so much that’s sympathetic and at the end of the day I just want his stupid ass to grow up and learn how to communicate his actual thoughts and desires and embrace his own brilliance and be fucking happy, like he and all his friends and family god damn deserve.
u may have noticed but i rly love jake english and also homestuck.
ok but i think there might actually be some substance to this
Dammek has a lot in common with dirk at the beginning of his story, and he has a very clear similarity to the Striders’ aesthetic (the fandom even called him Strideer when we found out what he looked like way back when). This is a complete shot in the dark, but I honestly wonder if Dammek is not meant in some way to directly mirror the Striders’ arc and pattern of family troubles.
Every “family” – be it actual ectobiological human relations or troll “bloodlines” – in Homestuck has a pattern to their personalities and stories. Maryams are mother figures with a predilection for the aesthetic, Lalondes struggle with alcohol and are fascinated by magic, and Striders create a tough or aloof surface persona that ends up being pretty poisonous to them in the long run, because they focus too much on one element of their personality to the exclusion of all else. This persona is always based on some kind of fundamental misunderstanding of who their parental figure is and an excessive attempt to imitate them.
What strikes me in all this is this image:
This poster is on Dammek’s wall, and I’m assuming it’s his ancestor – he has Dammek’s horns, his blood color, and what looks like some sort of whack Alternian firearm of the same sort as Eridan’s, so presumably he shares Dammek’s strifekind also. This picture is so intense and striking, so attention grabbing, that I have a hard time believing that it’s not important somehow and is only here for flavor.
It could be that Dammek’s whole Cool Resistance Leader personality is based on him imitating his ancestor, leading him to hyperfocus on one element of himself that is ultimately harmful to himself, and, more importantly, his moirail. This would be a direct parallel to the Strider pattern so intensely and specifically that I actually kind of wonder if there’s something more going on here. But, I’m not going to speculate too much. Just something I thought I’d bring up.
And, as far as not wanting him to die? Read Homestuck, man. Homestuck is not a depressing story where bad things happen to people. No main cast died in the endgame. These kids are gonna be fine, the main four anyway.
oooo now this is interesting, i hadn’t noticed this potential ancestor stuff. I will most definitely be keeping track of that going forward >:)
It sounds awesome, for sure–I’ve been fond of the word vassal since my disgaea days for some reason. I don’t see myself as coming up with this stuff, though–I just go off what I see referenced in Homestuck over and over. But that is definitely a term I hadn’t thought to search in the comic before just now–i’ll do some ctrl+f runs soon and see what pops up.
Flying through Storytelling 